Arizona Electric Festival 2020

One of the largest Electric only fun flies in the USA takes place every February just outside of Phoenix AZ. It is called the Arizona Electric Festival (AEF) and this year the date was Feb 7-8 and it attracted pilots from all over Arizona, California, Nevada, and Utah and the rest of the west coast. The weather was perfect, about 70 deg with no wind and sunny skies.

There was just under 100 pilots in attendance with many more spectators who came out to check out the show and learn about the hobby.

Mikado USA, the North American distributor for Scorpion was in attendance to support the event and also demonstrate Scorpions amazing power systems for airplane applications. Team pilots Santiago Perez and Kyle Dahl were in attendance.

Santiago had at the event one interesting plane. It was his 35% Extreme Flight Extra 300 which normally is his competition freestyle airplane which normally uses a 120cc gas engine.

The interesting thing about this plane was that it was still gas power directly up until the event. Right before the event Santiago decided to convert this gas freestyle model to electric power using the Scorpion SII-6530-180kv motor.

To do this Santiago used the new Scorpion Freestyle Cross Mount, which is a new motor mount which matches the bolt hole spacing of a 120cc gas engine which made itvery easy to convert his model to electric power. He even left the existing fuel tanks/ throttle servo/ ignition / smoke system in the model to make it easier to switch back to gas when he wanted to. With electric power the extra weight from these extra parts was not an issue and the model still flew beautifully! The conversion took Santiago just 15 minutes to do.Check out the video about this here!

During the noon demos Santi and Kyle did there legendary Airplane/ Helicopter Tandem show which was a big hit with the crowd!

Also one great plane to see was SupaTim’s (from NWRC) with his 120” Bushmaster which was also running the Scorpion SII-6530-180KV motor with Tribunus 130A ESC on 12s 5500mah batteries. Electric power suited this plane very well!

One other exciting model was Kyle Dahl’s super fast CARF Spark. This Jet is quite small but uses 12s 5800mah batteries and drains them in 3 minutes due to its high power draw! It has a 110mm 4 bladed fan with a Tribunus II 200A ESC. At the event they had a radar gun and they clocked the jet going 184mph (293kmh)!

All in all this event was a great one to attend to! There was always flying going on and always something nice to see.